ABSTRACT
In many historical accounts, seventeenthand eighteenth-century Rome is marked by its splendid buildings, fine art and political insignificance. Baroque Rome – and moreover all of Italy – appears barren on an intellectual level as well, with every impulse of modern thought oppressed by a dominant papacy and the Inquisition; the case of Galileo Galilei had induced a long-term trauma. Even contemporaries complained about Italy's backwardness compared with the wellknown home of scholarly exchange, France.
